The leader needed one of the team members to be sort of the “trip photographer” to take pictures of everything. Of course, I agreed. Throughout the day, I usually just took ordinary pictures, but I had some time to take fun pictures.

The view in the mountains, for one, was amazing, but there were trees growing right next to the road, so most of my pictures from the car looked like this.

Yeah, I had dozens like that. I did find this one though:

Then in the evenings, we had about an hour to rest. I usually walked around taking pictures of bugs and stuff.

This last picture was fun to edit. I spent hours messing with the lighting and colors.

I have been playing with a technique I heard about a long time ago, but never tried it till recently. With a DSLR camera, one that the lens can come off, you can hold the lens on backwards and it will work like a microscope. This plant is really about half an inch long:

Amazingly enough, I did not edit this at all. Some of the colors changed when the lens was not held perfectly against the camera, which is actually another technique some photographers use. The background is actually many more plants, but the bokeh is so strong it is blurred to that creamy brown. Here’s a few more:

So I only have been playing with this for a day, but I enjoy this and will continue messing with it, hopefully with even better results!

It’s been a few months, but I recently took a few pictures, mostly of plants. This Winter, being fairly warm, seemed to have brought flowers a little early. This is a rosemary plant and only one branch had flowers.

I really like this picture, but if you can’t tell what it is, it’s a stick driven into a pot with some plants.

So recently there have been many thunderstorms around my house. Unlike some people, I love them! And as a photographer, I want to take a picture of the lightning. Anyone who has ever tried photographing lightning has probably realized you cannot take a picture of it when it flashes because by the time your camera responds, it’s gone. I thought I could just take many pictures really quickly and I might be able to catch the lightning! This did not work and I ended up with literally thousands of pictures of dark clouds. After some research, I found I should take a long picture which is how I captured this:

A week later, I had another chance and captured my favorite lightning picture yet:

This I took while in a setting called bulb. It takes a picture as long as I hold down the shutter button. When I let go, it stops taking a picture.

Capturing lightning pictures is fun because while it’s excruciatingly hard, the picture is immediately gratifying when, or if, you succeed.

I finally got to posting this week. Unfortunately, I only have a month left of my photography coarse, meaning the supposedly weekly posts will not be so weekly, but scattered about. Anyway, this week I had to complete a photo-shoot with around five diverse pictures of a single person. This challenged and helped me a lot. Here are the results:

Next week, I need to capture a picture that conveys an emotion of some sort.

The female posing assignment went pretty easily. My sisters like to pose and can do a pretty good job, so I need to give only a little direction. One tip for posing girls is to have them make them form an S.

The first time a person hears this they might think some very painful and awkward pose. This is what my teacher really meant:

She has her hips one way, her collarbone another, and her head to the side. This creates one of many poses for women.

Here are also some pictures of our hike on a mountain near us. After we made it to a peek, I told them to stand still on the rocks while I captured this picture.

I Actually captured this one the day after our hike:

We liked it so much that we went two days later.

And next week I need a cool picture of a man, another thing I really need to work on.

I did not publish anything last week because that was the winter break for my online school. And next week is spring break for the public schools! But that hardly affects a homeschooler like me. Anyway, I captured a picture of my sister behind a building:

My teacher did not have much to say on it, seeing that we ran short on time, but I felt there was a problem. I should put the person’s head on a clear spot, which I forgot to do in this one. It’s not terrible, but my teacher has said “you don’t want a poll sticking out of their head.” Besides that, I like it.

Here are a few other pictures I captured last week:

Sunsets were the first things I liked capturing with my camera. And I am now working on portraits, so I combined the two:

Next week I need to submit a picture of a well posed female. I do not know how to pose people real well, so this assignment should help we with that.